There
is a good movie to be made about drone strikes as currently practiced by the
United States government. About the morality of conducting these operations, how
they calculate what “collateral damage” is acceptable, about the effect it has
on those tasked with carrying out those missions, and about whether the fact
that drone strikes make it safer and easier (for the American military anyway)
means that they go overboard with using it. Andrew Niccol’s Good Kill is not
that movie. As a character study of one of the drone pilots, it doesn’t really
work as the character is so closed off emotionally, and so monotonous in his
actions, and the plot both when he’s flying the drones, and his home life so
predictable, that much of the movie is dull. In the final act – when Niccol
tries to up the drama a little bit, it comes across as false – as if Niccol didn’t
know how to end the movie, so he ramped everything up, which doesn’t really
work with what came before. If there’s value in the movie – and there is at
least a little – it’s in stirring up debate among the people who see it. Great
movies do that while also telling a great story – Good Kill doesn’t get there.

The
film stars Ethan Hawke as Major Thomas Egan. After being an actual pilot –
flying combat missions for years – he is now stationed in Las Vegas, where every
day he goes into a trailer with his team and flies a drone over Afghanistan.
Sometimes, the only thing he has to do is surveillance – watching to see if a
target is there. But more often than not, he is given a mission. His missions
consist of him getting into position, and then firing a missile. The drones are
so high up, no one of the ground has any hope of seeing them, and the missiles
strike within a matter of seconds, obliterating everything in their path. He is
the best at his job – an emotionless zombie, who knows what it really means to
fly, and who carries out the orders of his commander, Jack Johns (Bruce
Greenwood), without thought or questioning. At the end of the day, he drives
home to his wife, Molly (January Jones) and their two kids. He’s just as much
of an emotionless zombie there as well. It’s not that he doesn’t love his wife
and kids, but that he is having trouble with his job and cannot deal with it.
At least when he was flying in combat there was a separation – over there, and
back home. Now, it’s one and the same. As his team gets tasked with conducting
secret missions for the CIA – represented by the cold voice of Peter Coyote on
a speakerphone – it gets worse. Now he’s bombing people in countries American isn’t
even officially at war with. And often, he is told to wait after firing his missile
– that way, when people run into help those blown up, he can blow them up to.
When his co-pilot, Vera Suarez (Zoe Kravitz) points out this is exactly what
terrorists do, she is ignored.

Hawke
is an excellent actor – and he is very good in this role, or at least, he plays
the role exactly the way it was meant to be played. He is closed off
emotionally at all times, drinking constantly, although he rarely seems drunk.
He conducts his missions precisely the way they want them to be conducted. The
problem is at home, he is the exact same way. He doesn’t want to talk about his
work to his wife and kids – bring home the violence and death he sees (and
causes) everyday – but since he cannot think of anything else, that means he
spends most of his time staring off into space. He is a drone himself.

That
is undoubtedly the point of the movie – and it’s a point writer/director Andrew
Niccol makes very well. Egan is an emotionless void on the surface who never
seems to get angry. But as his wife tells one of her friends when she asks what
happens when Tom gets angry, she replies “He gets even quieter” – it’s a scary
thing. We know eventually he will explode – he almost has to in order for the
movie to have a traditional structure – but for much of the movie we have no
idea what’s going on inside his head. Again, that is the point of the movie,
but it doesn’t make it all that dramatic – all that interesting to watch. It doesn’t
help that aside from Egan, the rest of the cast is given one note roles. Jones
as the wife who wants to be supportive, but is tired of his moods, and
essentially raising the kids by herself. We know eventually she will say
something along the lines of “You’re not here even when you are” – and, of
course, she does. Greenwood is effective as the Commanding officer, who may not
precisely like what they do, but does it anyway – being able to fully justify it
to himself. Kravitz’s function seems to be much like Hawke’s function was in
another Andrew Niccol movie – Lord of War, about an international arms dealer
(Nicolas Cage – in one of his very best performances) - where Hawke showed up
once in a while to make a dramatic speech about how evil Cage was, just in case
the audience didn’t get the message. Kravitz is a talented young actress, but
there is little anyone can do with a role like that (Hawke didn’t fare much
better in Lord of War) – and her bizarre flirtation/attraction to Egan doesn’t make
any logical sense at all. There are two other members of the team – but they
are “true believers”, and the movie doesn’t do much with them at all.

The
last act in the film doesn’t make much sense. For an hour or so, Good Kill
shows us mission after mission of the same thing – they are given orders, and
Hawke carries them out, and if women and children are killed, so be it. They
have no idea what any of the men are “guilty” of – it’s above their pay grade,
and they don’t get to ask. The one person they know is evil – a rapist who
comes into a courtyard during Hawke’s surveillance efforts on a large compound,
and rapes a housekeeper, they do nothing about. They are waiting for the owner
to return so they can blow up the house – who cares about some local rapist? We
know eventually that Egan has to snap – both at home and at work – because that
is what happens in movies like this. He does, but in ways that feel completely
false – an excuse to add false dramatics to a movie that didn’t have any
dramatics for most of its runtime. It may have been far duller to just continue
with Egan pulling off his missions like a mindless automaton, but it also would
have made a lot more sense, and be truer to the spirit of the movie, and its
message.

Niccol
can be a fine writer/director at times. His Gattaca (1997), with Hawke, has
become one of the most loved sci-fi films of the 1990s with good reason. And
despite Hawke’s speechifying in Lord of War (2005), is an extremely
entertaining, Scorsese-esque drama, that may have been a worthier successor to
GoodFellas (a clear influence) has Niccol not given in and felt the need to
explain to the audience just how evil his main character was (we already knew,
without being told). It’s that – the tendency to underline the morality, or
lack thereof, of his characters in specific, on-the-nose dialogue, that sinks
Niccol’s features as often as not (like Simone or In Time). In Good Kill, he
has very little other than his message. The film will stir debate to be sure –
but as a movie, it’s more than a little dull.

About Me

I am an accountant, living in Brantford, ON - and although I am married and have beautiful daughter, I still find time to watch a lot of movies. This blog is mostly reviews of new movies - with other musing thrown in as well.